The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past.

-Wassily Kandinsky, 1911

It’s important to write things down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and just settling down in the muck of your own mind…you have to make a resolution just to write for yourself… in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

-Allen Ginsburg

I don’t wish to touch hearts. I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.

-Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing can be more dreary than ‘coolness’ . . . all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair listening to their awful ‘likes’ and ‘like you know’ and ‘wow crazy’ and ‘a wig, man’ ‘a real gas’–All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to high school level and be attributed in part to my doing!

-Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 1957

It builds into a whole universe of C major – like a casino.

-Toby Spence, on performing Lully’s Te Deum in the Royal Palace at Versailles

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.

Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everything changes, nothing is lost.

-Ovid, Metamorphoses